Here's one way to raise some cash for this: get the guy(s) who invented PHP to sit on a chair, then sell waterlogged sponges to all the people who've ever used PHP. As they throw the sponges, let them shout things like "pick a naming standard and stick to it, you bastards!", or "read the fsking Dragon Book before you inflict your high-school-level language design skills on the rest of the world!". You'd raise a mint.
They're not going to wait until they've got a godzillion dollars worth of evidence before they nab him. I think it's reasonable to state that $1.5 million kangaroubles is more than enough excuse to bring him in. It doesn't say anything about how much MORE he'll be found guilty of.
I figure all they need to do is threaten to make him spend an hour locked in a room with the stars of Australian Big Brother if he doesn't confess. He'll be singing like Britney in no time!
Yes, well... there are a significant number of/.ers who think space opera was invented in 1977 by George Lucas, aliens crossbreeding with humans was first thought up in the sixties by Roddenberry, and no one had ever heard of using a command line to control a computer before Linus Torvalds invented the idea for Linux 1.0...
1. Find out who's the highest-ranking pillock to use his/her speakerphone to listen to voicemail.
2. Have a friend of an appropriate sex call him/her up and give him the following message:
"Darling! Last night was the most amazing experience of my life! Did you really mean it when you said you'd leave your wife/husband/etc and run away with me to Madagascar? I'll be round at [some time about half an hour after he/she usually listens to voicemail] with my suitcase and string bikini! See you soon snooky-wookums!"
3. Watch the results.
4. [Please note how I did not add "3.... Profit!" to this list. Are you amazed at my originality?
Oddly, the most useful utility I ever found for the Windoze/MS-DrOSs world would have to be Borland's Turbo Pascal 3, which I believe you can download from the Borland website nowadays because it's so old. It's a gem - it can do everything you need a programming language for, at least in the DOS environment, and it produces fast, small executables in no time. Even tho it's ancient, it still has its uses simply because the editor, compiler and runtime environment all fit on a bootable 360K floppy. Find me a version of C# that does THAT!
We have three main mobile service providers in Australia: Telstra, which is still (just) majority govt-owned, and Optus and Vodaphone which are private.
Optus is woefully unreliable - their entire network died on New Year's Eve, and SMSes between Optus phones and non-Optus phones can take 12 or 24 hours to arrive.
Telstra has the best coverage and the most reliable service, even tho (or because?) it's a Microsoftian semi-monopoly. Optus is shit. About Vodaphone, I have no opinion...
Simple solution: never rely on an ISP for your email. There are some totally hopeless ISPs out there; this woman's problems aren't a drop in the ocean. Instead, get a web-based mail account including IMAP access so you can use a non-web-based mailer. The best one on Earth is Fastmail, but you can even settle for Hotsnail or Yapoo if you must. Then, whenever your ISP dies, or you decide to dump them in favour of one that understands the concept of service and reliability, then you don't need to change your address.
The grownup version of this solution is to get your own domain name through a reliable provider of such services, and then when you change email systems you can just change a couple of MX entries or whatever and it's all done.
I agree. The only problem I have with it is that when you're recording a keyboard macro, the Tab key doesn't work (behaves like a no-op, mostly). That's very minor; apart from that it's fine, and I like it enough that I even registered it.
Beware - this is Piers Anthony, so rather than getting ten answers to ten questions, you'll really only get one answer expressed ten almost-identical ways, with the title of "Incarnations Of Interview" and a glossy cover.
An asteroid this size hitting the earth might just save the human race.
Rationale: we need to go into space, because Earth is too small for a race of hyperfertile, nearly-immortal technological wizards, which is what we'll be within a scant few centuries. To get a foothold, we really need to start NOW. However, the space race is over, and we could no longer put a man on the moon no matter how much we might want to. So we need encouragement. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there's no encouragement like mortal terror. Blow a few kilotonnes of the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, or demolish a bit of desert or a slice of Antarctica, and suddenly we'll find all the encouragement we need.
So I'm barracking for the asteroids. Go, rocky lump, go! Hit the world and save it, or keep missing and doom the lot of us!
Now that's bizarre. I knew not one but two Andrew Taylors when I did Computer Studies at Canberra University fifteen years ago, and the one you've referred to isn't either of them. What is it about the name Andrew Taylor that causes one to become a computer educator at an Australian University? Is this like the Eric Conspiracy but more detailed?
I had an idea based on this. Help me find the holes in this:
1. All CDs and DVDs are produced with a 65536-bit unique identifier. 2^2^16 is about 1 CD or DVD per person on earth per second for the next 9-followed-by-19000-zeroes years, so that should be about enough, I expect.
2. When software is run from a disk, it reads the unique ID and presumably won't run if the identifier isn't in the range allocated to the company.
3. The unique ID is pre-burnt, so you can't override it.
Obviously you can still hack your copy of WordStar 2003 to ignore the unique ID, but you can't simply copy the disk any more.
This doesn't solve the problem of legitimate backup copies, of course. It also doesn't solve the problem of wanting to make lots of free copies of a commercial program so you don't have to pay for it -- but that's rather the point, nu?
OK Hax0rs - what would be the way around this scheme? Hacked disk drives that return a configurable ID might work, if you know the ID; the counter to that would be to make the unique ID unreadable -- that is, use it like a public key/private key system, so that a program never really reads the ID (and indeed can't) but something in firmware combines the unique ID and the software's expected ID range and returns a yes or no, re-encrypted so the software has to decrypt it. Dunno. Any ideas?
That's OK - the Australian government doesn't fear information. They just got voted back in for a third term, which demonstrates that ignorance and stupidity are alive and well, and not threatened at all by knowledge and intelligence.
Also we think it unfair that only those users with fast connections can download CD images.
I just finished downloading a 648Mb image of the Mandrake 7.2 CD. It took the better part of two days, but I managed it with a 56K modem and an ordinary phone line connected to a P3 running Windows 2000. Ordinarily, I can't manage a 10Mb download without some kind of time-out and failure, but now I have a secret weapon.
The secret weapon is a program called GetRight, which basically handles all the downloading, allowing segmented downloads and a manual resume facility. I needed to resume four times, three times because my ISP disconnected me, and once because I was installing some other software and had to reboot. The download worked without a hitch, however, and I'm looking forward to finally getting Linux up on my PC tonight.
Note: this is not a paid advertisement. The product is good enough that I'll trumpet it without any inducement whatsoever. Any Windows user who doesn't have it obviously isn't interested in downloading stuff.
I can't see Mr Nir Arbel as anything worth crowing about. He claims to be worthy of our attention, but he's just boring. Consider:
Body shape: Mr Arbel has two arms, two legs, a torso and a head. BORING!!! That design has been kicking around at least since the 1920s, possibly earlier. If he wants us to pay attention to him, why doesn't he try something new, like tentacles, which work well for squid but which haven't been used in any land-based mammals that I know of, despite their obvious utility for important stuff like swimming and catching fish.
Writing style: Mr Arbel uses vowels all the time. How can he claim any kind of innovation? Linus Torvalds himself pioneered the use of vowels in software when he invented a variable type called "int" in the early nineties. This is just copyright infringement on the part of Mr Arbel.
Clear, rational argument: For g*d's s*ke, why must we keep listening to people who read widely and carefully and then write articles that are clear and well-written? It's blatant, unforgiveable discrimination against the visually impaired, the illiterate and the grumpy, three minorities that deserve equal time in all areas. This sort of thing is not acceptable in the modern world.
You guys are right! It must be crap! Look at the evidence:
1. Some of the things it does are similar to Java. Java is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
2. Some of the things it does are similar to C++. C++ is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
3. Some of the things it does are not done by C++ or Java. Making up new ideas is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
4. Some of the things it does are done by both C++ and Java. Copying old ideas is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
5. It contains features I don't understand. Anything I don't understand is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
6. It contains features I understand well. Anything that simple and obvious is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
C# is crap! Spread the word!
: Bat :
(Less sarcastically: I would love to join you in your M$ bashing, guys, but I'm just not in love enough with my own opinions. I keep trying new things. I guess it's a character flaw.)
I was a bit suprised that there was no mention of Linux in this article.
On one hand, so was I. But that might just be because I rarely hear the word "Microsoft" nowadays except in a sentence that includes the word "Linux".
On the other hand, this article brings home the point that, from Microsoft's perspective, Linux's resistance really is futile. I heard a statistic (dunno how true it is) that Linux is still used today on fewer computers than OS/2 was in its heyday. Of course, we know the real reason for this: Linux's heyday hasn't arrived yet; when it does, it -- through Open Source and the Bazaar -- will change the world. But that's not yet; for now, it hardly shows up on the Redmond Radar [TM].
BTW no one at comment level 2 or above (my default) has yet mentioned Microserfs by Douglas Copeland, a magnificent book about life in a Macintosh development team (!) at Microsoft in (I think) the early nineties. Gels perfectly with James Fallows's article.
This is basically the last big hurdle on the way to what I call Gear. (The name comes from the short-lived SF series _Earth 2_, where it referred to the heads-up, voice-controlled computer/communicators the humans wore.) Consider:
Morning. Get up. Get dressed. Put on your Baldric, a Miss-Universe-style sash made of trendy-stereo-grey squares, roughly the size of cigarette packets. You're going for state-of-the-art, so your Baldric contains:
- a RAM RAID, four or five Gear Cells of high-capacity, non-volatile memory, redundantly copying each other so that nothing short of a flamethrower will cause memory loss.
- a Jack-In-The-Box, a cell containing a speaker, microphone, infrared and microwave tranceivers, all sorts of cable in/outs, and all the software necessary to allow your Gear to communicate with the mobile phone network, internet, infranet, and you.
- a Brain Cell, a pluggable, replaceable processor.
- an Eye Ball, a cell containing a digital camera and a projector; this does most of the visual display work, projecting on a nearby wall, or connecting to your optional heads-up display.
- a Handle, a slightly oversized cell with a chord keyboard _and_ a Palm-style stylus/graffitti-pad arrangement for quick, quiet text input.
You operate your gear using voice commands, mostly, but like most power users you don't only use English. GearCorp have followed the example of Palm Computing, whose Graffitti is not quite standard handwriting but rather a modified, streamlined version. Knowing that some sounds are easier to detect than others, they invented a language called Glish. So: a casual user might open a work file with the command "Menu File. Open. Section 'Work'. Section 'Memo'. Document 'DailyMemo'.", On the other hand, you, as a power user, would say "Fie Oh Dok At 'Work' At 'Memo' At 'DailyMemo'". Rolls off the tongue, and is much quicker for you and the Gear.
Go to work. That is, go to the park, sit there and conduct work in relaxed surrounds. Take calls, write programs or documents, "attend" meetings, all while sitting on a park bench watching the world go by. If you need confidentiality, use the Handle, or speak in Glish. In your briefcase you have a full-sized foldable keyboard and a foldable flatscreen with easel legs, so you can avoid using the Handle and the Eye Ball if you like.
I think it'd work. I think it'll be here within five years. And I think it'll change the computing world more than anything since VisiCalc.
The language really isn't the issue. Delphi actually uses the same compiler "engine" as Borland C++, so legend has it. Basically, just change expect("{"); to expect("begin"); and you're most of the way there...
The first big difference is the GUI. With Delphi, development is almost as easy as with VB, but the end product is much smoother and more tweakable; it's a compiler, not an interpreter.
The second big difference is what they call the VCL: the Visual Control Library. This is basically a Pascal interface to all the stuff that C programmers used to have to write message loops to handle. There are one or two special features in Borland's extensions to Pascal and C++ that handle this - message dispatching objects, object properties with implicit read/write operations, persistence, and so on.
Borland/Inprise/AshtonTate/Corel/WordPerfect/Kenne dy/Onassis Corporation has two tasks ahead of it, on the road to Delphi for Linux: converting the GUI, which is easy (KDEvelop is a good first try at the general idea), and creating a compatible but full-featured VCL. The second task is a doozy; ask one of the teams working on Delphi-compatible systems (for no good reason there seem to be two competing teams, a fact which might explain why they haven't finished anything yet, or might explain why they've tried so hard).
The advantage no one has realised yet: they'll be able to release C++ Builder they same day they release Delphi. They may even make the back-end pluggable, so you can use GCC, tho the GPL may make that difficult for commercial users since the VCL certainly won't be GPLed.
I'd prefer to avoid the name "GNU/Linux" for another reason: respect. The creator of Linux (well, creators really, but never mind that) decided that it would be called Linux. Insisting that they're wrong is just legal piffle, and quite rude in a way.
From now on I'll be calling RMS by a new name that I invented: Tom Dingleplop Clevernose. I understand that Mr Dingleplop Clevernose's parents may be a little shocked at this, since they chose the name "Richard" and they rather expected their wishes would be respected, but for reasons of my own I choose not to comply. Furthermore, I contend that anyone who refers to Mr Dingleplop Clevernose by the old name of RMS is showing disrespect for me, and that's much worse.
OK, it's silly, and it doesn't quite fit the facts. Tom -- I mean, RMS -- insists on "GNU/Linux" for reasons that, on the face of them, make more sense than a silly whim. But when you get down to it, it really is a matter of respect. I think Linus deserves as much respect as RMS does; if you disagree, and you think the difference is large, then your conclusions will be different, I guess. This is simply one bat's feeling on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one way to raise some cash for this: get the guy(s) who invented PHP to sit on a chair, then sell waterlogged sponges to all the people who've ever used PHP. As they throw the sponges, let them shout things like "pick a naming standard and stick to it, you bastards!", or "read the fsking Dragon Book before you inflict your high-school-level language design skills on the rest of the world!". You'd raise a mint.
Right. Better get back to debugging my PHP...
They're not going to wait until they've got a godzillion dollars worth of evidence before they nab him. I think it's reasonable to state that $1.5 million kangaroubles is more than enough excuse to bring him in. It doesn't say anything about how much MORE he'll be found guilty of.
I figure all they need to do is threaten to make him spend an hour locked in a room with the stars of Australian Big Brother if he doesn't confess. He'll be singing like Britney in no time!
Yes, well... there are a significant number of /.ers who think space opera was invented in 1977 by George Lucas, aliens crossbreeding with humans was first thought up in the sixties by Roddenberry, and no one had ever heard of using a command line to control a computer before Linus Torvalds invented the idea for Linux 1.0...
1. Find out who's the highest-ranking pillock to use his/her speakerphone to listen to voicemail.
... Profit!" to this list. Are you amazed at my originality?
2. Have a friend of an appropriate sex call him/her up and give him the following message:
"Darling! Last night was the most amazing experience of my life! Did you really mean it when you said you'd leave your wife/husband/etc and run away with me to Madagascar? I'll be round at [some time about half an hour after he/she usually listens to voicemail] with my suitcase and string bikini! See you soon snooky-wookums!"
3. Watch the results.
4. [Please note how I did not add "3.
: Bat :
Oddly, the most useful utility I ever found for the Windoze/MS-DrOSs world would have to be Borland's Turbo Pascal 3, which I believe you can download from the Borland website nowadays because it's so old. It's a gem - it can do everything you need a programming language for, at least in the DOS environment, and it produces fast, small executables in no time. Even tho it's ancient, it still has its uses simply because the editor, compiler and runtime environment all fit on a bootable 360K floppy. Find me a version of C# that does THAT!
We have three main mobile service providers in Australia: Telstra, which is still (just) majority govt-owned, and Optus and Vodaphone which are private.
Optus is woefully unreliable - their entire network died on New Year's Eve, and SMSes between Optus phones and non-Optus phones can take 12 or 24 hours to arrive.
Telstra has the best coverage and the most reliable service, even tho (or because?) it's a Microsoftian semi-monopoly. Optus is shit. About Vodaphone, I have no opinion...
Simple solution: never rely on an ISP for your email. There are some totally hopeless ISPs out there; this woman's problems aren't a drop in the ocean. Instead, get a web-based mail account including IMAP access so you can use a non-web-based mailer. The best one on Earth is Fastmail, but you can even settle for Hotsnail or Yapoo if you must. Then, whenever your ISP dies, or you decide to dump them in favour of one that understands the concept of service and reliability, then you don't need to change your address.
The grownup version of this solution is to get your own domain name through a reliable provider of such services, and then when you change email systems you can just change a couple of MX entries or whatever and it's all done.
Stop procrastinating and get packing, dingleberry!
Furrfu!
I agree. The only problem I have with it is that when you're recording a keyboard macro, the Tab key doesn't work (behaves like a no-op, mostly). That's very minor; apart from that it's fine, and I like it enough that I even registered it.
: Fruitbat :
Beware - this is Piers Anthony, so rather than getting ten answers to ten questions, you'll really only get one answer expressed ten almost-identical ways, with the title of "Incarnations Of Interview" and a glossy cover.
: Fruitbat, recovering Piers Anthony reader :
An asteroid this size hitting the earth might just save the human race.
Rationale: we need to go into space, because Earth is too small for a race of hyperfertile, nearly-immortal technological wizards, which is what we'll be within a scant few centuries. To get a foothold, we really need to start NOW. However, the space race is over, and we could no longer put a man on the moon no matter how much we might want to. So we need encouragement. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there's no encouragement like mortal terror. Blow a few kilotonnes of the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, or demolish a bit of desert or a slice of Antarctica, and suddenly we'll find all the encouragement we need.
So I'm barracking for the asteroids. Go, rocky lump, go! Hit the world and save it, or keep missing and doom the lot of us!
: Fruitbat :
Now that's bizarre. I knew not one but two Andrew Taylors when I did Computer Studies at Canberra University fifteen years ago, and the one you've referred to isn't either of them. What is it about the name Andrew Taylor that causes one to become a computer educator at an Australian University? Is this like the Eric Conspiracy but more detailed?
: Fruitbat :
Excellent idea, excellent implementation. Bravo! Are you sure you're a /. reader? You seem so... sensible!
: Fruitbat :
From the PowerPoint presentation:
"Unlike RMS, many two-way translation components are immature or unstable"
That's funny. Everything I've read suggests that RMS is also immature and unstable.
But very consistent. Always consistent.
: Fruitbat :
I had an idea based on this. Help me find the holes in this:
:
1. All CDs and DVDs are produced with a 65536-bit unique identifier. 2^2^16 is about 1 CD or DVD per person on earth per second for the next 9-followed-by-19000-zeroes years, so that should be about enough, I expect.
2. When software is run from a disk, it reads the unique ID and presumably won't run if the identifier isn't in the range allocated to the company.
3. The unique ID is pre-burnt, so you can't override it.
Obviously you can still hack your copy of WordStar 2003 to ignore the unique ID, but you can't simply copy the disk any more.
This doesn't solve the problem of legitimate backup copies, of course. It also doesn't solve the problem of wanting to make lots of free copies of a commercial program so you don't have to pay for it -- but that's rather the point, nu?
OK Hax0rs - what would be the way around this scheme? Hacked disk drives that return a configurable ID might work, if you know the ID; the counter to that would be to make the unique ID unreadable -- that is, use it like a public key/private key system, so that a program never really reads the ID (and indeed can't) but something in firmware combines the unique ID and the software's expected ID range and returns a yes or no, re-encrypted so the software has to decrypt it. Dunno. Any ideas?
: Devilsadvocatebat
That's OK - the Australian government doesn't fear information. They just got voted back in for a third term, which demonstrates that ignorance and stupidity are alive and well, and not threatened at all by knowledge and intelligence.
: Fruitbat :
Here are some I quite like that you don't seem to have included:
May contain traces of nuts.
Falling Rocks Do Not Stop.
No Seatbelt Fine Exceeds $100.
and of course
Offer void where prohibited by law.
: Fruitbat :
Also we think it unfair that only those users with fast connections can download CD images.
I just finished downloading a 648Mb image of the Mandrake 7.2 CD. It took the better part of two days, but I managed it with a 56K modem and an ordinary phone line connected to a P3 running Windows 2000. Ordinarily, I can't manage a 10Mb download without some kind of time-out and failure, but now I have a secret weapon.
The secret weapon is a program called GetRight, which basically handles all the downloading, allowing segmented downloads and a manual resume facility. I needed to resume four times, three times because my ISP disconnected me, and once because I was installing some other software and had to reboot. The download worked without a hitch, however, and I'm looking forward to finally getting Linux up on my PC tonight.
Note: this is not a paid advertisement. The product is good enough that I'll trumpet it without any inducement whatsoever. Any Windows user who doesn't have it obviously isn't interested in downloading stuff.
: Fruitbat :
Body shape: Mr Arbel has two arms, two legs, a torso and a head. BORING!!! That design has been kicking around at least since the 1920s, possibly earlier. If he wants us to pay attention to him, why doesn't he try something new, like tentacles, which work well for squid but which haven't been used in any land-based mammals that I know of, despite their obvious utility for important stuff like swimming and catching fish.
Writing style: Mr Arbel uses vowels all the time. How can he claim any kind of innovation? Linus Torvalds himself pioneered the use of vowels in software when he invented a variable type called "int" in the early nineties. This is just copyright infringement on the part of Mr Arbel.
Clear, rational argument: For g*d's s*ke, why must we keep listening to people who read widely and carefully and then write articles that are clear and well-written? It's blatant, unforgiveable discrimination against the visually impaired, the illiterate and the grumpy, three minorities that deserve equal time in all areas. This sort of thing is not acceptable in the modern world.
Shame, shame, shame, Mr Arbel!
: Fruitbat :
You guys are right! It must be crap! Look at the evidence:
1. Some of the things it does are similar to Java. Java is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
2. Some of the things it does are similar to C++. C++ is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
3. Some of the things it does are not done by C++ or Java. Making up new ideas is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
4. Some of the things it does are done by both C++ and Java. Copying old ideas is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
5. It contains features I don't understand. Anything I don't understand is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
6. It contains features I understand well. Anything that simple and obvious is crap. Therefore C# is crap.
C# is crap! Spread the word!
: Bat :
(Less sarcastically: I would love to join you in your M$ bashing, guys, but I'm just not in love enough with my own opinions. I keep trying new things. I guess it's a character flaw.)
Black on white text. Not dark grey on light greeny grey, but black on white.
Now that's a feature worth getting.
: Fruitbat :
On one hand, so was I. But that might just be because I rarely hear the word "Microsoft" nowadays except in a sentence that includes the word "Linux".
On the other hand, this article brings home the point that, from Microsoft's perspective, Linux's resistance really is futile. I heard a statistic (dunno how true it is) that Linux is still used today on fewer computers than OS/2 was in its heyday. Of course, we know the real reason for this: Linux's heyday hasn't arrived yet; when it does, it -- through Open Source and the Bazaar -- will change the world. But that's not yet; for now, it hardly shows up on the Redmond Radar [TM].
BTW no one at comment level 2 or above (my default) has yet mentioned Microserfs by Douglas Copeland, a magnificent book about life in a Macintosh development team (!) at Microsoft in (I think) the early nineties. Gels perfectly with James Fallows's article.
: Fruitbat :
This is basically the last big hurdle on the way to what I call Gear. (The name comes from the short-lived SF series _Earth 2_, where it referred to the heads-up, voice-controlled computer/communicators the humans wore.) Consider:
Morning. Get up. Get dressed. Put on your Baldric, a Miss-Universe-style sash made of trendy-stereo-grey squares, roughly the size of cigarette packets. You're going for state-of-the-art, so your Baldric contains:
- a RAM RAID, four or five Gear Cells of high-capacity, non-volatile memory, redundantly copying each other so that nothing short of a flamethrower will cause memory loss.
- a Jack-In-The-Box, a cell containing a speaker, microphone, infrared and microwave tranceivers, all sorts of cable in/outs, and all the software necessary to allow your Gear to communicate with the mobile phone network, internet, infranet, and you.
- a Brain Cell, a pluggable, replaceable processor.
- an Eye Ball, a cell containing a digital camera and a projector; this does most of the visual display work, projecting on a nearby wall, or connecting to your optional heads-up display.
- a Handle, a slightly oversized cell with a chord keyboard _and_ a Palm-style stylus/graffitti-pad arrangement for quick, quiet text input.
You operate your gear using voice commands, mostly, but like most power users you don't only use English. GearCorp have followed the example of Palm Computing, whose Graffitti is not quite standard handwriting but rather a modified, streamlined version. Knowing that some sounds are easier to detect than others, they invented a language called Glish. So: a casual user might open a work file with the command "Menu File. Open. Section 'Work'. Section 'Memo'. Document 'DailyMemo'.", On the other hand, you, as a power user, would say "Fie Oh Dok At 'Work' At 'Memo' At 'DailyMemo'". Rolls off the tongue, and is much quicker for you and the Gear.
Go to work. That is, go to the park, sit there and conduct work in relaxed surrounds. Take calls, write programs or documents, "attend" meetings, all while sitting on a park bench watching the world go by. If you need confidentiality, use the Handle, or speak in Glish. In your briefcase you have a full-sized foldable keyboard and a foldable flatscreen with easel legs, so you can avoid using the Handle and the Eye Ball if you like.
I think it'd work. I think it'll be here within five years. And I think it'll change the computing world more than anything since VisiCalc.
: Fruitbat :
The first big difference is the GUI. With Delphi, development is almost as easy as with VB, but the end product is much smoother and more tweakable; it's a compiler, not an interpreter.
The second big difference is what they call the VCL: the Visual Control Library. This is basically a Pascal interface to all the stuff that C programmers used to have to write message loops to handle. There are one or two special features in Borland's extensions to Pascal and C++ that handle this - message dispatching objects, object properties with implicit read/write operations, persistence, and so on.
Borland/Inprise/AshtonTate/Corel/WordPerfect/Kenne dy/Onassis Corporation has two tasks ahead of it, on the road to Delphi for Linux: converting the GUI, which is easy (KDEvelop is a good first try at the general idea), and creating a compatible but full-featured VCL. The second task is a doozy; ask one of the teams working on Delphi-compatible systems (for no good reason there seem to be two competing teams, a fact which might explain why they haven't finished anything yet, or might explain why they've tried so hard).
The advantage no one has realised yet: they'll be able to release C++ Builder they same day they release Delphi. They may even make the back-end pluggable, so you can use GCC, tho the GPL may make that difficult for commercial users since the VCL certainly won't be GPLed.
: Fruitbat :
From now on I'll be calling RMS by a new name that I invented: Tom Dingleplop Clevernose. I understand that Mr Dingleplop Clevernose's parents may be a little shocked at this, since they chose the name "Richard" and they rather expected their wishes would be respected, but for reasons of my own I choose not to comply. Furthermore, I contend that anyone who refers to Mr Dingleplop Clevernose by the old name of RMS is showing disrespect for me, and that's much worse.
OK, it's silly, and it doesn't quite fit the facts. Tom -- I mean, RMS -- insists on "GNU/Linux" for reasons that, on the face of them, make more sense than a silly whim. But when you get down to it, it really is a matter of respect. I think Linus deserves as much respect as RMS does; if you disagree, and you think the difference is large, then your conclusions will be different, I guess. This is simply one bat's feeling on the matter.
: Fruitbat :